Pork kakuni with scallop congee

So I have the itch to blog again… and what better time than now, when it’s time to hash out those lovely winter recipes that have been sitting around the kitchen for months on end? The last time I made buta no kakuni was last Christmas; impatience and a loose hand with the soy sauce led to a sad and salty affair with rough meat. This time, I was going to bring out the big guns. Cue this excellent recipe I came across from Chubby Hubby’s blog, which in turn comes from Masaharu Morimoto’s ‘The New Art of Japanese Cooking’. When I first came across it, it looked impossibly complicated – with a very long cooking time and lots of waiting about, I was turned off of the idea. But I decided the effort would be worth it, and took the plunge.

I didn’t take any photos during the process because (a) who said I was cooking this for purpose of blogging about it? (b) I wasn’t sure how successful it’d be. Well, here I am now, blogging about a very successful dish… and it has inspired me to blog more again!

I did, as I’m prone to do, make a few alterations. One was using ordinary white short grain rice in the initial braising process instead of brown – I just couldn’t be bothered to buy a pack of brown rice (weirdly expensive in Japan Centre) and I couldn’t find any information on what the effect would be, except that it ‘tenderises’ the meat – not sure what the difference is between brown and white rice, though. For the first part, I’m guessing the rice keeps the pork tender by ‘insulating’ it as it braises, protecting it from too much direct heat? Brown rice probably doesn’t break down as much as white in that time, therefore ‘protecting’ the pork for longer? Err, Heston, give us a hand…?

The initial braising process is 8 hours, but I cheated. I did it only for 4 – my pork belly was already sliced into strips when I bought them, so I figured it needed less time. I started at 8pm after work and couldn’t leave the oven on all night, either! Then it was left to rest, as Chubby Hubby did, in the oven overnight. The next night, the pork was removed from the thick rice mixture and, instead of wastefully discarding the rice as suggested, I bunged it into my rice cooker, added some chicken stock and the soaked dried scallops and made the congee that way! The rice, afterall, had soaked up so much flavour from the pork during that initial cooking process so it would have been silly to throw all that away.

The resulting congee was so silky, and so full of porcine goodness and lovely dried scallop flavours. With some chopped spring onions and a sprinkle of sesame seeds, it was enough!

So then the pork went on to be braised again for several hours with a mixture of soy sauce, sake, sugar and water, along with bamboo shoots and chunky pieces of daikon (my own additions, because I love the way they soak up the flavours of anything it is braised with). Result! The pork was already falling apart after the first cooking process and by the second it was meltingly tender. Gorgeous.

See that piece just falling off? ;)

I’d recommend anyone to give this recipe a shot. It may sound daunting at first, but you really do just leave it to do its own thing most of the time. Set it aside for a weekend when you’re home, shying away from the cold.

The full recipe can be found on Chubby Hubby’s blog. Remember not to throw the rice away! ;) Times like these you really can tell I’m of an Asian (or ‘Oriental’ as they say here) persuasion…

REEEEEWIND…
Oh, and I’m intending to do a few more posts that I’ve been meaning to do for ages. Yes, I am talking about Colombia! And I have also recently discovered an unfinished draft of a second Vienna post hidden in my dashboard. Oops. So, yeah. Stay tuned.

a little tea heaven

The next best thing after discovering a really fabulous place to eat/drink is to have someone else show you one of their favourite destinations. So on Thursday, a certain Ms Wong took me to the Sunsing Teahouse, located on the 32nd floor of the Soundwill Plaza in Causeway Bay. It’s a clean, quiet and sophisticated (yet unintimidating) teahouse overlooking the Times Square area, and from the moment you walk in you will feel calm, serene, and oh-so-far removed from the noise and chaos down on street level. Just the way a perfect tea house should make you feel.

It’s also clearly a haven for tea connoisseurs and lovers alike; on our visit there was a large group of Japanese women who stayed for hours, participating in what looked like a lesson on tea given by one of the group. The group pictured on the far left, we assumed, were true-blue tea fanatics congregating to enjoy several precious teas. The room is filled with quality teas, including rare aged puehr, gorgeous tea ware, and tea literature.

Each table has its own wooden water tray (with a discreet tube that draws the excess water away into a wooden bucket under the table), glass tea ware and china cups, and a black ceramic (?) kettle with an electric heating device to heat the water. A complimentary plate of Macanese treats were presented, which included phoenix egg rolls filled with dried pork floss and sesame seeds, wrapped with nori, and mini almond cakes (which I polished off with relish).

I took the liberty to order our first pot of tea – osmanthus oolong, one of my favourites and a tea that will always cheer me up with its uplifting, peachy aroma and clean taste. Being somewhat intimidated by the fiddly tea ware, I let Angie take over in the tea-pouring business. But to make things short, Sunsing’s website has a rather charming little tutorial on how to properly prepare and drink your tea. The tea was lovely as expected, and once we’d gotten all we could out of the leaves, we ordered a pot of west lake dragon well tea. All vibrant green leaves, the tea had a strong, very earthy, almost roasted rice-like aroma, so it was a good tea to follow after the gentle and floral osmanthus oolong.

The teahouse doubles as a shop, and virtually any kind of tea or teaware you can think of is available. From clay teapots for brewing that perfect oolong, to traditional, classy gaiwans. To my delight, they also sold the little double-walled glass teacups that I’ve always been meaning to buy from Jing Teas back in London. Each are handmade (in Taiwan) and unique. These little cups are not only delicate and beautiful (a real work of art), but extremely practical – the double wall is designed so that you don’t burn your fingers on the cup. At only $15HKD (£1) per glass, it was a steal considering the £2.50 price tag from Jing. And I have to thank Angie for sneakily paying for them as well as all our tea!

Teas start from $30HKD per pot (though note there is a minimum charge of $30 per person) and can go up to over $150 for the more expensive, rare teas. Unfortunately there’s a time limit on how long you can stay – two hours, though we found that was just enough for us – by the end of it, we were totally ‘tea-ed out’ and full to the brim. The service was, of course, impeccable.

Conclusion: A brilliant place, and a good one to go to if you’d like to learn more about teas.

Sunsing Tea House (新星茶莊)
38 Soundwill Plaza, 32/F, Shop 3201
Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
Tel: 2832 2889
www.sunsingtea.com

ode to an egg tart

Hot, silky custard
in a crumbly puff pastry -
an eggy delight.

Far better than
those cold, stodgy custard tarts
sold back in Britain.

good vietnamese food? nha.

Yeah, I should have known better than to trust a hyped-up food critic way past his day. Or one simply of his standing – one of the most recognised critics in Hong Kong – as if a restaurant would dare serve him substandard crap! His glowing review of Cafe Locomotive, however, caught our eye. If you’re interested in why, he deemed their beef broth to be as glorious as the ones he’d had in Vietnam. We’re always on the lookout for decent Vietnamese joints in Hong Kong, since they’re few and far between and always erring on the side of inauthenticity. We decided that we’d troop all the way there like lemmings to indulge in the fabled broth.

As is usual with me, I woke up late and took even longer to paint my face; by the time we’d gotten on the bus my mom was fretting over the fact that we’d hit the restaurant during the lunch peak. At 12:45, the place was full, but there were no visible queues or anyone loitering around for a seat. The waitress took our name down and we waited for just 5 minutes before a table was ready.

It looked promising – all airy and with dark wooden furniture, high ceilings and some interesting decor. On a warm winter’s day (?!) in Hong Kong, this is the perfect kind of environment for a laid back lunch. There aren’t very many seats, but at least the high ceilings and semi-al fresco seating helps eliminate any inklings of claustrophobia.
I absolutely loved the decor. It was modern meets traditional – the restaurant itself is based on the story of a street stall based near a train station in Vietnam that would attract hordes of people with their mouthwatering pho, and a gigantic photographic print of the station in question hangs on one wall (as the only photo with the print in it includes my unsightly mug, it is not shown here). The two walls are also lined with luggage racks to simulate the inside of train carriages – charming! If only the food was as inspiring.

The menu boasts ‘authentic Vietnamese beef soup & chicken stock’, and the big seller is the ‘Locomotive signature rice noodle soup’, but we were far from impressed. The stock, to put it bluntly, lacked BEEFINESS – it was also surprisingly sweet, unappetisingly so. Squeezes of lime helped slightly, but overall it was a disappointment, considering this was their supposed selling point. I prefer a simple pho bo, but their signature dish included beef balls, beef tripe and beef tendons. My mom found the beef tendons in the noodles undercooked and bland, and I don’t think either of us touched the tripe – it looked exactly as what we thought it would taste – rubbery and flavourless. I’m tempted to say this was possibly the most underwhelming pho I’ve ever eaten in Hong Kong, but I’m not sure if it’s because of its own failings or due to my high expectations.

Moving on… after a disappointing encounter with a prawn and pomelo salad at Nha Trang earlier in the week, I ordered Locomotive’s version, which came beautifully presented. So pretty that the couple next to us were whispering loudly about it and subsequently asked the waiter to tell them what it was (side note: are Hong Kongers so unfriendly towards each other that a simple question to the table next door is totally impossible?). Its looks, however, belied its less-than-gorgeous taste. I expected a flavour explosion here – crisp, juicy pomelo contrasting with salty-sweet cabbage and carrots, a tang from the limes, a subtle aniseedy kick from the Asian basil… you get the picture. What resulted was a half-hearted assault on the tastebuds from limp flavours and way too much of the basil (bad memories of liquorice allsorts came flooding back…). The prawns were tepid and would have benefited from a bit of grilling; instead they seemed to have just been brought back from the freezer-dead and boiled. What I found at the bottom was a large amount of extremely watery nuoc cham, which didn’t help at all in the flavour stakes.

I was really confused about it all. Alas, Choi Lan, I knew better than to trust you and your smarmy ways. If only I’d read the 37 bad reviews (versus 9 good ones) over at OpenRice beforehand. The common folk are, again, the ones to trust. I always feel sad about writing off a place, especially one as nicely done as Locomotive – but as usual, the food speaks volumes. Sometimes it’s hard to know who’s really right, though (the media are positively fawning over the place), and who knows – maybe you’d like it. Perhaps I’ll give it another go somewhere along the line… maybe.

Cafe Locomotive (Contemporary Vietnamese Cuisine)
11 Wun Sha Rd, Tai Hang, Hong Kong
2882 8227
www.cafelocomotive.com

breakfast in central

When you walk through the fresh food markets of Central, the sights and sounds can be an assault on the senses – on this occasion, so much so that we’d walked right past Hoi Wun without realising it. This was soon rectified, and we made our way into this charming little cha chaan teng (HK-style ‘tea restaurant’) for a much-needed breakfast.

Established in 1972, its humble provenance is reflected in the array of nostalgic childhood toys peppered on the cafe walls. Apparently, the owner’s brother is a designer and uses the cafe as an informal ‘gallery’ of sorts, collecting and displaying relics from the 70’s and 80’s – dolls, old piggy banks, plastic telephones and such. I regret not taking detailed photos of the displays, but may do next time (with permission)… it really is a fascinating place.

As any experienced cha chaan teng goer would know, the ideal seating is always the booth – offering the diner privacy, but with the luxury of seeing everything around them. The whole experience was more about the environment, to be honest. We ordered a simple breakfast of fried eggs and sausages with bread (I know, I know… why?), mainly because we didn’t have the power to stomach their famous satay noodles that early in the morning (and on second thought, I don’t think they serve it until lunch time!). And looking back, I wish I’d ordered a classic hot HK-style milk tea instead of the cold version (the hot drink comes in a quaint, thick rimmed cup so reminiscent of the type used in classic HK tea restaurants like these) – but after walking up and down the street in a wool coat (I underestimate how hot it can get in HK even in the dead of winter), I wanted nothing but ice. With that said, the iced milk tea still slid down like silk – smooth and velvety HK-style milk tea beats any other brew, hands-down.

Next time, I’ll be trying their recommended french toast, or the fresh-from-the-oven ‘pineapple buns’ (if you didn’t know already, the name refers to the somewhat crosshatched pattern on the bun from a crusty sugary layer, and not to its flavour) from their bakery trolley. I think that’s possibly the best way to enjoy Hoi Wun – in the lull of the afternoon, with a hearty cup of hot tea or coffee in one hand, and a bun in the other.

海運冰廳 (Hoi Wun Cafe)
28 Gage St, Central
open daily 7am-5pm
cash only
tel: 2545 4334